ITU and Secretariat of the Basel Convention to protect environment from hazardous e-Waste

Geneva, 12 March 2012 - International collaboration to promote environmentally sound management of e-waste was strengthened with the signing of an agreement between the Secretariat of the Basel Convention (SBC) and ITU aimed at protecting the environment from the adverse effects of e-Waste.

The rapid spread of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) has raised public attention on the negative effects arising from inadequate disposal and waste management. Electronic waste, which contains toxic materials used in the manufacturing process, can cause widespread damage to the environment and human health. The ITU-SBC collaboration seeks to collect and recycle the hazardous materials by introducing safeguards in the management of the waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or e-Waste.

Developing countries are expecting a surge in e-Waste, with mobile phone waste expected to grow exponentially. Sharp increases of e-Waste have until now not been matched with policy and regulatory mechanisms nor with infrastructure to cope with the influx in developing countries. Currently, only 13 per cent of e-Waste is reported to be recycled with or without safety procedures.

The issue of e-Waste as an emerging telecommunications policy and regulatory issue has received recognition at the highest level in ITU. Key examples of ITU´s activities in this area include:

• The adoption of Recommendation ITU-T L.1000, “Universal power adapter and charger solution for mobile terminals and other ICT devices”, which dramatically reduces production and cuts the waste produced by mobile chargers.
• The adoption of Recommendation ITU-T L.1100, which details the procedures to be employed when recycling rare metal components included in ICT equipment.
• Designing e-Waste management strategies for environmental protection; publishing and disseminating best practices; and assisting countries in the drafting, adoption and implementation of  policies, laws, and regulations related to e-Waste management.

At the level of global environmental policy, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, which came into force in 1992, is the most comprehensive environmental agreement on the management of hazardous and other waste. But many countries have not yet successfully translated its provisions into their national legislation. Now, with the signing of the ITU-SBC Administrative Agreement, efforts between both UN mechanisms will be leveraged, maximizing value at the global level and strengthening collaboration between telecommunication/ICT and environmental policy makers for the global good.

“The ICT sector is already making significant progress in improving its environmental performance and reducing e-Waste through improved best practices and standards,” stated ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré. “The collaboration with the Secretariat of the Basel Convention will allow the global community to address this ever-increasing problem through a holistic approach, involving the recycling industry as well as environmental policy makers.”

“The positive impact of ICT on development, particularly in developing countries and countries with economies in transition is well recognized and acknowledged,” said Mr Jim Willis, Executive Secretary of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions. “However, ICT equipment has to be dealt with in view of its entire life-cycle, and this includes the time when the equipment comes to its end-of-life and becomes e-Waste. Collaboration between ITU and SBC will further our shared objectives in support of sustainable development that essentially includes environmentally sound management of waste.”

ITU and SBC have agreed to cooperate through regular dialogues and meetings; exchange of information, practices, experiences and materials; coordination of activities in areas of mutual interest, including development of green ICT standards, international cooperation and capacity building; and execution of supplementary activities, projects and programmes.

For more information, please contact:

Sanjay Acharya

Chief, Media Relations and Public Information

International Telecommunication Union

E-mail: sanjay.acharya@itu.int

Tel: +41 22 730 5046

Mobile: +41 79 249 4861

Matthias Kern

Senior Programme Officer

Secretariat of the Basel Convention

E-mail: matthias.kern@unep.org 

Tel: +41 22 917 8767

About ITU

ITU is the leading United Nations agency for information and communication technology. For over 145 years, ITU has coordinated the shared global use of the radio spectrum, promoted international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, worked to improve communication infrastructure in the developing world, and established the worldwide standards that foster seamless interconnection of a vast range of communications systems. From broadband networks to new-generation wireless technologies, aeronautical and maritime navigation, radio astronomy, satellite-based meteorology and converging fixed-mobile phone, Internet and broadcasting technologies, ITU is committed to connecting the world.

www.itu.int

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About Basel Convention

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was adopted in 1989 and entered into force in 1992. It protects human health and the environment against the adverse effects resulting from the generation, management, transboundary movements and disposal of hazardous and other wastes. The Convention currently has 178 member countries (Parties).

www.basel.int

Photo copyright: Kai Loeffelbein 

Our offer of online training has been expanded to address a variety of new issues relevant to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions. Find more by consulting the schedule of webinars for this year.

The growing e-waste volumes generated worldwide together with the lack or even absence of well-organized collection and management systems in Africa, where a disproportionate amount of this waste ends up, threatens Africa’s environment, its national economies and the health of local communities. In many African countries e-waste is routinely disposed on uncontrolled dumpsites, where waste volumes are periodically reduced by setting them on fire, causing a range of toxic substances to be released, heavily contaminating air, soil and water resources. Even unburned, in tropical climate, many e-waste fractions will soon release major pollutants, damaging human and environmental health. The serious consequences of this mounting environmental problem are now starting to attract the widespread public attention.

The Secretariat of the Basel Convention is pleased to announce the Pan-African Forum on E-waste to be held from 14 to 16 March 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya.

This two and a half day forum is being organized with the support of Hewlett-Packard and Dell. The forum aims to bring together relevant stakeholders from the governments of Africa, international organizations, academia and the private sector. The forum seeks to identify possible options for a sustainable solution to e-waste in Africa by developing a clear perspective on an environmentally sound e-waste management framework applicable in the African context. Forum participants will discuss the need for regulatory frameworks and ways of establishing or strengthening national, regional and international collaboration.

Join us in Nairobi and be part of a new initiative to address the e-waste problem facing Africa!

Agenda

E-waste Africa Project page

The tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention was held at the Cartagena de Indias Convention Centre (CCCI) in the majestic city of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Theme of the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention was “Prevention, minimization and recovery of wastes”.

The meeting opened at 10 a.m. on Monday, 17 October, and concluded on Friday, 21 October 2011.

The final report of the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties is now available in all languages. Please visit the meeting documents page to access the report.

International conference adopts a package of strategic decisions on waste avoidance and management in the 21^st century

Geneva (25 October 2011) – Representatives of 118 members of the Basel Convention, the global treaty on waste management, have reached a historic agreement unblocking an amendment that will ban the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries, known as the Ban Amendment.

The groundbreaking decision, containing a set of measures aimed at strengthening international control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes, was adopted on 21 October, the closing day of the 10^th meeting of the Parties to the Convention (COP10), in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

The ground for the breakthrough was prepared by the Country Led Initiative (CLI) to Improve the Effectiveness of the Basel Convention, initiated by the Governments of Indonesia and Switzerland at the last Conference in 2008.  The effort was supported by the Government of Colombia, host of the Conference.

The so-called CLI decision allows the Ban Amendment to come into force for those countries who wish to adhere to it, but also moves forward in establishing a regime for countries who wish to trade in waste to ensure the minimization of health and environmental impacts, ensuring adequate social and labour conditions and creating new economic opportunities. It clarifies the interpretation of Article 17(5) of the Convention, setting the bar for entry into force of the Ban Amendment. The amendment will enter force once an additional 17 parties ratify it.

“The results of the Cartagena conference offer a concrete example of how transformative environmental action can serve to reduce poverty and promote a healthy environment and social equity, advancing the promise of a green, sustainable economy which will be the focus of the Rio+20 conference next year,” said UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. "All too often UN negotiations can be characterized by frustration and stalemate. The Cartagena meeting provides an antidote to such perceptions and bodes well for the next round of discussions on the way forwards towards  an ambitious  mercury treaty that reconvene at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi next week," he added.

“In Cartagena, we have demonstrated that multilateralism works,” said Paula Caballero, the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs officer who served as President of COP10.

“The striking progress made in Cartagena demonstrates how by working together Governments can find common ground on issues that have confounded agreement for well over a decade. Cartagena has given to the global community a model for achieving sustainable development in the field of waste management,” said Jim Willis, Executive Secretary of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions.

The agreement on the Ban Amendment capped a week of negotiations between the Conference’s 700 participants.  In addition to the CLI decision, the Conference in Cartagena also adopted Strategic Framework for the implementation of the Convention over the years 2012-2021, which sets out a vision, guiding principles, strategic objectives, means of implementation, and indicators of achievements. The Strategic Framework aims at strengthening the environmentally sound management of such wastes as a contribution to promoting human health, sustainable livelihoods, and eradicating poverty.  Technical Guidelines were adopted on co-processing of hazardous wastes in cement kilns, environmentally sound management of mercury wastes, and environmentally sound management of used tyres, and further work was mandated on additional guidelines.

More than 25 separate decisions on matters as wide-ranging as compliance, financial assistance, private- public partnerships, and the role of the Regional Centres for Training and Technology.

The Parties also adopted the Cartagena Declaration on prevention and minimization of hazardous wastes. The declaration complements the Strategic Framework in determining the work under the Convention in years to come. It reaffirms that the Basel Convention is the primary global legal instrument for guiding the environmentally sound management of hazardous and other wastes and their disposal, including efforts to prevent and minimize their generation, and efficiently and safely manage those that cannot be avoided.

A key provision of the declaration recommends that the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) “should consider prevention, minimization and recovery of wastes as a key contribution to advancing the three pillars of sustainable development through environmentally and socially sound economic development, poverty reduction, and protection of human health and livelihoods.”  

The declaration also calls for the creation of a global methodology for accurate measurement of national waste generation. This would provide a means of gauging national efforts to make progress in waste prevention.

The Cartagena meeting was the last of three related conferences of the Parties to the major chemicals and waste global treaties held in 2011. The parties to the Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions had met in April and June 2011, respectively. Decisions on synergies between the three conventions taken at the earlier meetings depended on the concurrent agreement of COP10. The Basel Convention´s Parties adopted a substantially identical decision enhancing cooperation and coordination among the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions and agreed on joint activities in the synergies part of the 2012-2013 work programme.

The 10^th meeting of the Conference to the Parties to the Basel Convention was held from 17–21 October 2011.

The eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2013. Mr. Franz Perrez (Switzerland) was elected to serve as President of the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties.

Note to editors:

The 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal is the most comprehensive global environmental treaty dealing with hazardous and other wastes.  It has 178 members (Parties) and aims to protect human health and the environment against the adverse effects of the generation, management, transboundary movements and disposal of hazardous and other wastes.  

The Basel Convention has two pillars. First, it regulates the transboundary movements of hazardous and other wastes. Second, the Convention obliges its Parties to ensure that such wastes are managed and disposed of in an environmentally sound manner. To this end, Parties are required to prevent or minimize the generation of wastes at source, to treat and dispose of wastes as close as possible to their place of generation and to minimize the quantities that are moved across borders. Strong controls have to be applied from the generation of a hazardous waste to its storage, transport, treatment, reuse, recycling, recovery and final disposal.

The Conference of the Parties is the supreme decision-making organ of the Basel Convention. It meets every other year to discuss programmatic and budgetary issues for the next biennium.

The Ban Amendment was adopted in 1995. Entry into force of the amendment had been mired in a controversy over the number of ratifications by Parties needed to bring this about.  In the intervening decade, the quantity of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes has increased.  A growing share of the international trade in hazardous waste is believed to lie outside of the framework of environmentally sound management.

Trade in hazardous waste has grown significantly between developing countries, a trend unforeseen when the Convention was adopted more than two decades ago. Such trade is not addressed by the Ban Amendment.

Recent years have seen efforts under the Basel Convention to develop a global strategy for environmentally sound waste management.  In 2002, UNEP has established under the Basel Convention a partnership addressing the environmentally sound management of used and end-of-life mobile phones, the first of several strategic partnerships in different areas of waste management.  

In 2008 an additional partnership - the Partnership for Action on Computing Equipment (PACE) - was launched on used and end-of-life computing equipments. In these partnerships government representatives work together with the manufacturers, recycling industry, academic institutions and public interest NGOs.

The Basel Convention has 14 Regional and Coordinating Centres, with one or more operating on every continent. The Centres develop and undertake regional projects, and deliver training and technology transfer for the implementation of the Convention under the direction of the Conference of the Parties and of the Secretariat of the Convention.

The Cartagena meeting was held under the theme “Prevention, minimization and recovery of wastes”. It marked only the second time the Conference of the Parties has been held in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The first meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention was held in Piriapolis, Uruguay, in 1992.

The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2011 to be the International Year of Chemistry.

For more information, please contact:

Ms. Katharina Kummer Peiry, Executive Secretary, Secretariat of the Basel Convention,
+41-22-917 5488, e-mail: Katharina.Kummer@unep.org

Mr. Michael Stanley-Jones, Press Officer, Joint Services of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, UNEP, +41 (0)79 730 4495, e-mail: SafePlanet@unep.org

Please also consult the web site of the Basel Convention: http://www.basel.int/

Donwnolad the Spanish version.

Under the theme “Prevention, minimization and recovery of wastes”, the tenth meeting of the conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention presents a unique opportunity to present to the Rio+20 conference with a concrete example of how transformative environmental action can deliver important economic and social outcomes. If managed in an environmentally sound manner, the extraction of valuable secondary raw material from wastes can create green business opportunities and decent jobs for millions of often young people throughout the developing world, thus playing a part in eradicating poverty.

Achim Steiner
UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director

For the complete article, see the Basel Convention bulletin (September 2011).

Geneva, 14 June 2011 - The Multilateral Environmental Agreements Information and Knowledge Management Initiative (MEA IKM), launched today develops harmonized MEA information systems to assist Parties and the environment community at large access information from multiple agreements from one location. Supported by UNEP the initiative currently includes 17 MEAs from 12 Secretariats hosted by three UN organizations and IUCN. It is open to observers involved in MEA information and data management.

The first project – InforMEA, the United Nations Information Portal on Multilateral Environmental Agreements – is/was launched on 14 June at the occasion of the initiative’s 2nd Steering Committee Meeting, attended by Ms. Maria Louisa Silva, Executive Secretary of the Barcelona Convention, Mr. John Scanlon, Secretary General of Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and Mr. Jim Willis, Executive Secretary of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions.

“With the launch of InforMEA the global environmental community has taken a major stride forward in making access to information more transparent and easier to apply in solving the complex challenges we face in the Information Age”, Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

The InforMEA Portal presents Conference of the Parties decisions and resolutions, news, calendars, events, country specific MEA Membership, national focal points, as well as in the near future national reports and implementation plans organized against a set of 200 hierarchical terms taken from MEA Conference of the Parties (COP) Agendas.

In contrast to similar endeavors this project harvests and displays information directly from MEA Secretariats websites and data bases, who remain the custodians of their data. This allows for accurate and timely data availability in a cost effective manner. MEA secretariats individually implement the technical solution identified.

Harmonization of information standards and formats will facilitate the development of many other knowledge tools among conventions. For example, the Convention on Migratory Species and CITES could display the species listed on their respective appendices or the Stockholm Convention may feature decisions related to endangered migratory species threatened by POPs. Once such an application is developed, the tool is maintained at minimal cost.

www.informea.org - Making key MEA information “speak to one another”

For further information please contact: Marcos Silva (CITES) [marcos.silva@cites.org] and Eva Duer (UNEP) [eva.duer@unep.org], (respective MEA representative)